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Crowdsourced Weather Forecasting with Google Glass

Google Glass creates more opportunities for live crowdsourced weather data collection. An app built for Glass could make use of the accelerometer and camera to automatically take a photo of the sky when the wearer is outside and tilts their head upward. The data would be collected and processed and added to existing weather data collection efforts. Algorithms could automatically detect weather features such as sky colour cloud types, precipitation type and amount, maybe even wind speed. If this app were installed by a significant number of Glass wearers, the amount of data could be significant.

From the Developer Guides it doesn’t seem this app is possible with the Explorer Edition. However, I would expect that the right APIs would be enabled in the near future, potentially for the initial public release.

In their initial video for Project Glass “One Day…”, Google shows the trigger of looking at the sky to display weather information. Perhaps they are already thinking about snapping a photo at the same time, but it hasn’t been built yet as far as I can see.

Since Glass is an Android device, it will be very simple to integrate with pressureNET. Our data collection and analysis system is already in place at Cumulonimbus, so we could provide the Glass wearer with additional data to improve their personal forecasts.

If Google would like to pass me some Glass I’d love to build a prototype. I promise not to name it SkyNET.